3D Hunting Trophy Whitetail Championship 2009 iPhone Preview

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Polygonal deer stand no chance.

By Levi Buchanan

MachineWorks' Northwest, the developer behind the exceedingly promising Prey first-person shooter for iPhone, is back on the hunt. This time, though, the mobile maker is trading in aliens for deer and other four-legged woodland creatures. 3D Hunting Trophy Whitetail Championship 2009 is a fully 3D hunting game that allows iPhone gamers to scour all non-island states, staking out deer and elk with a variety of weapons and real-world hunting tactics.

MachineWorks is really focusing on recreating the nuances of the hunt by including such things as smell and hearing ranges for the animals. Deer, for example, will perk up if they are downwind from you. If they catch a whiff of your human musk, they may flee. However, you can use their sense of smell to your advantage with special scents designed to attract animals. There are calls, too, that work to lure your quarry into range. Once you have the animal in range, you can use rifles or a bow to bring it down. Some rifles use just sights, but others have impressive scopes for making pinpoint shots. You unlock weapons in Trophy Whitetail's Action Mode.

(By the way, not all prey is friendly. You need to watch out for some, well, less-than-docile woodland wonders.)

Trophy Whitetail offers different times of day to head out into the wilderness, such as dawn and dusk. Choose your hunting time wisely, because this will affect your chances at bagging the big one. The control scheme is very similar to Prey. You have a number of virtual bars on-screen for moving your hunter and looking around. You can adjust the location of these bars and their transparency.

My preview edition of Trophy Whitetail features some very sharp visuals. The animals themselves look good, constructed out of decently detailed models with good texturing. But the terrain itself is what's most impressive about the game. The landscape is rendered entirely in 3D and the trees take up real space. The sky textures are also smart and look entirely different depending on the time of day. At dawn, for example, the clouds take on a brilliant pink hue as the sun creeps up over the horizon. Depending on the wind, clouds will move across the sky.

Trophy Whitetail will be in the App Store very soon. Look for a full review of the game on IGN Wireless in the near future.